A state of the art base station consumes a maximum power for a maximum traffic load in the respective cell. Such a base station is optimized for the maximum traffic load in the respective cell and consumes more than 50% of the maximum power even when no data is transmitted or received by the base station. The base station is operated inefficiently in times of low traffic loads in the respective cell, because a lower traffic load does not lead to a significantly lower power consumption of the base station. In other words, the ratio of consumed power per transmitted data bit increases significantly for relatively low traffic loads.